When I was in seventh grade, we had to line up by height in gym class. (We also had to wear disgusting one-piece blue gym suits with our names embroidered on the pockets, but that’s another story.) My classmate June Bennett was next to me in line. I don’t remember exactly how many people were taller than we were then, but when high school was over, I was 5′ 10″ and she was still 5′ 2″. But I had a couple of uncles over six feet, and she probably didn’t.

So I was tall, and therefore I thought of myself as big. Back then guys didn’t date girls taller than they were, so my social life was a bit limited. (Being tall might not have been the only reason, but that’s another story too.) And oddly enough, my three best friends were really short, so I spent a lot of time bending over to hear them.

In college, I still felt big, and I remember that I wore a size 12. I wear a size 6 now. Of course, when I was in college, size zero did not exist, and it does now, the clothing industry having recognized that women like to think of themselves as small. However, enough people have told me that I have a small frame that I am beginning to believe it. At age 70, when I don’t care a bit about being tall, I’m down to 5′ 9½ and shrinking.

When I was little, I was big; now that I’m big, I am little. Who knew?

An article I read in the paper the other day got me thinking about women friends, and where they are in my life. The article “Girl Talk Has Its Limits,” was about how teenage girls talk endlessly with their friends. It seems that studies have shown that too much talking as teenagers, especially revisiting the same problems over and over again, can contribute to “emotional difficulties.”

But what about too little girl talk?

Most of my social life is with couples (because I am a part of a couple) and that’s fine. My female co-workers, many of whom I consider friends, pretty much talk about work. Of the female friends I have known for years, I probably talk to only a handful more than once a month.

So, I decided I needed to bring girl talk back into my life, and invited my next door neighbor to come for tea without her husband. We spent over an hour together today, saying all the things we would never say if our spouses were with us. A lot of it was about our children, not what they are doing, but how we feel about what they are doing. Some was about being our age and the pluses and minuses of our “golden years”. And of course we talked about our spouses. We had a great conversation.

It was strictly girl talk.

This morning as I left for work, my husband Peter told me that I looked beautiful. He does that about every six weeks. You see, I get my hair cut about that often. Most of the time he doesn’t notice that I look different, but if I tell him in advance, he’ll usually say something nice when I get home. Lately, however, he says it before I get the haircut just in case he might forget to do it later.

But if I forget to tell him…

Take the last time, for example. Six weeks ago, after almost 20 years of going to Kelly for my haircuts, I tried someone new because she was on vacation. I went on my lunch hour unexpectedly because I was desperate and able to get an appointment with someone a friend recommended. When I returned to the office, my colleagues noticed immediately that my hair looked quite different. They liked it, as did I.

When I got home that evening, I asked Peter if he noticed anything different about me. His eyes gazed up and down my body, and he said “no.” I was miffed. I told him that all my work friends noticed immediately, my gentle way of saying “I can’t believe you can’t see the difference.”

So this morning I told him I was getting a hair cut today.

And true to form, as I left for work, he told me I looked beautiful.

Our son Jeremy was a fussy eater as a child. We had a small mucky-green skillet in which we had to fry up a hamburger for him every night. Now that he’s grown, he eats just about everything in sight. He has never met a piece of red meat that he didn’t like, but can down chicken nuggets with the best of them. He recently competed with his boss to see who could gain more weight from eating churrasco,and snuck a scale into a restaurant to battle it out. They weighed themselves before and after. Jeremy gained six pounds.

But for the month of September, 2008 Jeremy is a vegetarian. Here’s why. In 2003, Jeremy’s friend Yutaka started Excel Academy, a tuition-free, public charter school, serving underperforming middle school students in East Boston and Chelsea, Massachusetts. Its eighth graders were ranked third out of 280 Massachusetts school districts this year. It was named Charter School of the Year in 2007 by the Center for Education Reform. Like all nonprofits, it relies on contributions to supplement its meager budget.

This month, (note: September only has 30 days) Jeremy has a bet with anyone who pledges money to Excel. It works like this. People mail checks, made out to Excel Academy, to him. If he eats a morsel of meat in September, the checks will be returned. His meatless September hasn’t been easy so far, but he has $3,300 in pledges. If you want to learn more, go to http://www.NoMeatSeptember.com.

If this sounds like a shameless plug for Excel and Jeremy, it’s because it is.

On the Sunday before last, I read a glowing review of Anne Roiphe’s latest book, Epilogue: A Memoir. The book is about Roiphe’s struggle to come to terms with the sudden death of her husband after 39 years of marriage.

That evening our son Seth called. He mentioned that he had met a nice woman named Anne Roiphe a few days earlier while they were each waiting to tape an interview for a New York TV station. They chatted a bit, and she gave him a copy of Epilogue for his mother. He read me the inscription, “To Judy—I’m going to look at your blog as soon as I return to my computer. Best wishes. Anne Roiphe”

Talk about coincidence…

The book arrived on Wednesday. Despite the Democratic convention and a Red Sox/Yankees series, I finished it four days later. I will read it again. I will tell my friends to read it.

Roiphe tells us “Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.” The book is about how she manages to do the latter. She speaks to all of us as she describes how she overcame a challenge that we all fear.

I was moved to tears at the end. When I read parts of the book to Peter, I cried again. We all deal with loss in our own way, but Anne Roiphe’s memoir eloquently shows us hers.

There is a maple tree outside my office window. Although it is more than three stories high, which means it is also outside of the windows below and above mine, I consider it my maple tree.

Some springs there is a bird’s nest in my tree, and if I look carefully, I can see baby beaks reaching above their nest for breakfast. Often a pair of squirrels frolics among its branches. Occasionally, a hawk perches there and glares at me.

When the fall comes, my tree’s leaves are a riot of oranges and reds. On Friday, I noticed that my tree had four red leaves among the green.

Tomorrow is Labor Day. Another summer is behind us.

I had a productive meeting with a new colleague this afternoon. She is 27 years old (a mere 43 years younger than I), and I am enjoying working with her. (Hanging out with young folks is one of my favorite things to do.)

When we realized we needed to reproduce a brochure we didn’t have at our fingertips, I thought I might have a PDF of it buried in my email files somewhere. Shortly after she left, I found it and forwarded it to her.

Her email reply? “Dean Kugel, you rock!” I’m still grinning about it.

How about that? I’m 70, and I rock.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the last real week of summer, although the calendar tells us we have another four weeks to go.

Why can’t summer be as long as February, I wonder? The summer days are longer; we don’t have to take the time to bundle up each time we go out; no snow shoveling, no making sure the wood fire in the stove doesn’t go out (just kidding). Why does it go so fast?

On Friday, I asked my office neighbor, “Wasn’t it last Friday yesterday?” That’s how the summer weeks fly by.

Time-speed-wise, I feel that life is going like the summer—too fast. I don’t have enough time to do all the things I want to. Retire now? Retire later? How to choose? How long will I be healthy? Should my motto be “carpe diem”? (“Seize the day,” for those of you whose Latin is even more pathetic than mine.)

One thing is certain, I’ll be moaning about how fast the summer went a year from now, that is if my luck holds.

A graduate student meeting with me yesterday asked about my family—admittedly, it’s hard to miss the pictures of them when you visit my office. He asked how long Peter and I had been married and when I replied, “forty years,” he had a follow-up question. “And how many fights have you had?”

The odd thing is that I had an answer.

“Two”, I replied. (Bickering does not count as fighting—if he had asked how many times we’ve bickered, the answer would have been “thousands.”)

I vividly remember one wintery day twenty-some years ago when Peter and I were out running. We were fighting about the children (that time and also in the other major battle we had). I was so angry that I refused to keep running with him, and he went on by himself. I could tell you today the exact place where I stopped, but I can’t recall the details of the fight, possibly because he was right. I was miserable the rest of the day, but he seemed to bounce back immediately. (Holding on to anger is a subject for another time.)

My guess is that the graduate student fights a lot with his wife. I know they have had some challenges to work on. I told him that I don’t think that the number of fights is a good measure of the success of a marriage. But the question was an interesting one.

And how many fights have you had?

At the end of the work day on Friday, I sent an email to a colleague who is on vacation in the Austrian Alps. On Saturday morning, I had an answer from him. It arrived in my Inbox at 6:27 a.m., when I was, thankfully, asleep. “I’m reading this from an Alp with bad connections,” it began.

It reminded me of a time on a different mountain this summer when I was slower than my bicycling companion going up a killer hill. He waited at the top as I panted and puffed my way up. Not to waste a moment, he was reading his email on his Blackberry when I arrived.

Is there no such thing as a vacation anymore?

But, you may ask, why was I reading my work email on a Saturday morning? Is there no such thing as a weekend anymore?

My 96-year old aunt doesn’t do email. There was a letter from her in today’s mail.

It was nice.